


Back Up

by Anonymous



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angry Dean Winchester, BAMF Castiel (Supernatural), Castiel (Supernatural) Whump, Drugged Castiel (Supernatural), Gen, Hurt Castiel (Supernatural), Hurt/Comfort, Medical Inaccuracies, Medical Restraints, Protective Castiel (Supernatural), Protetive Winchesters, Rescue, Scared Castiel (Supernatural)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-24
Updated: 2019-03-24
Packaged: 2019-11-29 07:24:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,904
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18220019
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: Someone is draining the life force out of patients admitted to the E.R, so Cas lets Sam bind his Grace so he can pass for human and get himself admitted.Dean thinks the whole plan is way too risky, but lets his brother and their angel quiet his misgivings.Which is a shame, because it turns out Dean’s right.





	Back Up

**Author's Note:**

> See the end notes for possible trigger warnings, etc.

Dean parked across the street from the E.R, making sure they weren’t near enough to be picked up on any of the security cameras.

He said little, but it wasn’t hard to tell he was displeased with Sam’s plan.

“It’ll be fine,” Sam said, again, picking up on his brother’s mood. He turned to the angel; Cas was next to him in the back seat, pulling his t-shirt down and slipping into Sam’s hoodie. He felt odd in the borrowed clothing; the last time he’d worn items like that was when he’d been homeless, and that wasn’t a time he liked to think about.

“Anything wet, even your spit, should smudge the sigil enough to break it and that’ll let you have full access to your Grace again.”

The marking, drawn in sharpie, was just on the back of Cas’s shoulder, someplace he could reach easily but probably the last place any of the medical staff would be examining given Cas would be presenting himself for help with something else.

He wouldn’t be in there long enough for anyone to discover it, and if the worse came to the worse and they wiped if off, Cas would just make his excuses and leave.

But Dean…. Dean still wasn’t happy.

“This is like you going in there unarmed.”

Technically, that was true. Without his Grace, he was as vulnerable as a human albeit one who knew how to fight and had a lifetime’s worth - a very long lifetime’s worth - of knowledge and training on supernatural creatures, and battle. 

But he wouldn’t have his blade, and they hadn’t found a way for him to conceal even a small calibre handgun that wouldn’t be discovered at some point.

All the same, Cas wasn’t worried. He could quickly free the shackles Sam had put on his Grace with the sigil; and if, for any reason, he couldn’t and things became too much for him to handle, the Impala would be across the street, so help was literally at hand.

All Cas would have to do was run.

The look Dean gave him, when Cas said as much, wasn’t at all reassured. 

It wounded Cas that Dean had so little faith in him. Sam patted his shoulder, and then turned Cas to him so he could fasten up the hoodie.

“Just...you’ve got this, but be careful, okay? We don’t exactly know what we’re dealing with here.”

Cas nodded, and then he got out of the car, and started across the street. 

This was probably the bit Dean didn’t want to watch.

++

“You probably don’t want to watch this bit,” Sam said. Dean had been pestering him with what exactly Cas was going to say when he got into the E.R, what he was going to claim was wrong with him that would get him through to the treatment area and keep him there just long enough to work out if anybody on the medical staff was draining the life force out of the patients.

Sam had been avoidant on that topic, and since they both knew Cas was a shit day to day liar, Dean was sure the angel would be bounced out the door within five minutes.

Sam’s hand was suddenly on his shoulder, restraining, and Dean felt a cold shiver move down his back.

“Sam,” he said, warningly. “What the hell did you two-“

He didn’t get to finish. Cas was passing a parked car, and he looked around carefully and then slammed his knee into the front fender.

Even from there, Dean could see the way his leg was suddenly the wrong shape and he felt his gorge rise as Cas hobbled forward and then collapsed to the ground.

That solved the problem of Cas being crap at deceit. He wouldn’t have to be, now.

Dean didn’t even know he had the car door open, was half way out of it, before Sam yanked him back.

“He’ll be okay,” he said, but his voice was tight, and Dean got that maybe that hadn’t been easy for him to watch either. “They’ll give him something for the pain inside, and as soon as he knows who we’re looking for he can smudge the sharpie and he’ll be fine.”

Sam made it sound so easy, like they both didn’t know the fucking agony of a dislocated body part. To make it worse, as far as Dean was aware, that would be Cas’s first time and nothing, absolutely nothing, prepared you for it.

Didn’t matter how many horror tales you’d heard, or how many episodes of Bizarre E.R you’d sat through (probably for Cas, zero and zero), it was still like no other on pain on Earth.

And Cas was suffering through it alone.

He watched as passers by crowded Cas and got him up.

“Don’t put him on his feet, dammit,” Dean cursed, but they did anyway, though they took most of his weight, and guided him up the steps and through the doors and then he was out of Dean’s sight.

He turned back to glare at Sam. “This was your bright idea? What you two were plotting when you thought I wasn’t paying attention?”

Sam shrugged, guiltily. “It worked, Dean. And out of the three of us, Cas is the one least in danger in there.”

Unarmed. Grace bound up. And now with a dislocated knee that would hamper his so called ‘running for it’ idea if things went south.

“New rule,” Dean said. “Nobody else does the planning around here. You two suck at it.”

But Cas had been right about one thing; help was just across the street, if anything went wrong.

The problem with that was how were they to know if it did?

++

The medical staff were efficient, Cas noted. He was quickly helped onto a stretcher and wheeled into the treatment area before being set up in a cubicle.

Dean’s sweat pants, unfortunately, had to be cut open, the fabric over his injury now hanging loosely on either side of his leg.

He’d get him another pair. It could be a peacemaking gesture as well, and he was sure he’d need one when he went back out to them.

Because he didn’t doubt Dean had saw what he did, and only the sigil Sam had inked onto his skin was keeping him from being on the receiving end of some very angry prayers right then.

A doctor came and asked some questions, while a receptionist took his details; then he was examined, and that hurt a great deal.

But, the doctor said, apparently his knee would be relatively easy to put back in place (Cas knew as much; he’d been very careful about how to injure himself); some painkillers first, and then they would carry out the reduction followed by an x-ray to check everything was as it should be.

There was something about his manner, though, that made Cas ill at ease.

Doctors, of course, needed to touch their patients in order to assess and treat them. But he was touching Cas a lot, more than seemed necessary, and Cas caught the puzzled look on his face more than once.

The nurse pulled over a tray with a syringe and a vial of painkiller, but the doctor waved her away. 

“I’ll get this. Why don’t you start stitching up Mrs Williams?”

Once they were alone, the doctor pulled up a stool to sit next to the bed, and turned Cas’s arm so that he could find a vein.

“You seem familiar,” he said, conversationally, but Cas could tell there was an oddness to his tone. “We haven’t met before, have we?”

“No, I think I would remember,” Cas said, and winced as he felt the sharp pinch of the needle.

“There’s just something so…. I can’t quite put my finger on it.”

He pressed the plunger on the syringe, and Cas felt the cold nip as the drug entered his body. He wasn’t complaining; his knee was agony, and he couldn’t afford too much of a distraction.

“Well, I probably could, but I’d have to move your tee shirt and hoodie out of the way to get to it. Angel, right?”

Cas tried to sit up, but the doctor pushed him back down with insulting ease, and then Cas realised he was still injecting him.

He’d been around the brothers long enough to know that rarely, if ever, was the full content of an ampoule delivered.

“Let’s leave whatever you’ve put there to mask your true nature in place, why don’t we?” The doctor finished up and removed the syringe. He pocketed the ampoule he’d used. “I think you’ll be much easier to deal with like this. What I think we’ll do now, is wait until nobody would be surprised at your sudden death, angel, and then I’ll come by and feed. Since you were so kind to offer yourself up, like this.”

Cas tried to push him away, to get up, but his body felt too heavy to control. He couldn’t even speak.

The doctor lowered the bed down flat, and then he was yelling for help, pressing the alarm on the wall; nurses came rushing in, and he was lying to them, telling them the patient had suffered a bad reaction to the painkiller, and his breathing was erratic.

That last part was true; it felt like there was a weight on his chest he couldn’t shift, but that might have been panic, because this was not a eventuality he and Sam had foreseen.

Desperate, Cas willed his body to respond. He just had to reach the sigil, even disrupt the tiniest part of it and he’d be restored; he managed to lift his arm, enough to claw at the tee shirt as he tried to reach the marking, but the doctor quickly pushed his hand back down.

“Got some fight in him; Sally, let’s use the restraints, just in case. Sir, sir, you’re going to be fine.”

He leaned down over Cas, so no one else could see, and his face twisted into something else for a millisecond; Cas saw gleaming green eyes, a mouth too wide for a human’s, curved into a grin that revealed jagged teeth, and a long lolling tongue.

Then he was as he looked to everyone else.

He patted Cas’s shoulder mockingly, the one with the sigil just out of his reach, and then thick leather cuffs were being fastened around his wrists.

And, for a while, that was the last Cas knew of anything.

++

Sam had the case notes for this hunt on his laptop, and he looked up from them every other minute to check on the E.R. 

Or to check on Dean.

He got Dean’s worry; Sam was concerned, too, But the fact remained that of all of them, Cas was least in danger here, either from the creature they were hunting or from any medical drug or procedure.

No matter what happened in there, he could undo it all with a smudge of that sigil. Or they could, if he couldn’t for whatever reason.

It didn’t stop them fearing for him, but Sam felt the same when Dean went in solo, and he knew they both felt the same for him.

It was...the nature of the beast, that sometimes they just had to take chances.

“He’ll be okay,” Sam said, but he knew he didn’t sound half as convincing as the last time he’d told Dean so, or the time before that.

He didn’t know why, but he was starting to get this niggling doubt in his mind about the plan; maybe the sigil was too far down for Cas to reach, though they’d checked and it wasn’t.

When he was an angel, though; maybe when he was human, it was different; maybe his body, without angelic Grace souping it up, wasn’t quite as stretchy or mobile.

Maybe Cas had hurt himself so bad that the plan was right out of his head, or maybe they’d sedated him entirely which wasn’t something they’d considered because it generally wasn’t done for putting a knee back into place.

He tried to make himself stop; he was getting as bad as Dean, who’d no doubt already thought of all the ways their plan could go wrong and was just loitering there in the car long enough to pick the most likely before he stormed into the E.R.

But they had to give Cas a chance. Someone in there, always on the night shift, was leeching life force from patients. They were smart about it, using statistics to cover up their feedings. People admitted at night or on weekends were amongst the highest hospital fatalities, and the tiny spike in this particular hospital had gone unnoticed by the state officials.

Sam, though, had a computer programme set up that looked for anything on social media that might suggest a hunt, and a lot of people had taken to the internet to report the death of a loved one, and this hospital’s name had come up enough for the programme to flag it up to him.

So now here they were, and Sam could almost tell when Dean had waited enough.

He pulled his gun out of the glove box, and tucked it into the holster at the back of his jeans.

“Let’s go.”

“Dean,” Sam started, but it was no good. Dean was already out of the car, and across the street.

Sam dumped the laptop and got his own gun, and then raced to follow his brother.

++

Through of all it, Cas was aware enough to know what was going on. The doctor was skilled in more than just medicine; he explained quickly to the other medical staff assisting him that, given the patient’s reaction to the painkiller, further sedation would be a great risk, and so they would be intubating him as was.

What followed was one of the worst experiences of Cas life.

He knew then why the doctor has insisted on the restraints. Even drugged, having a foot long tube pushed into his throat was traumatic enough to have him fighting to stop them, but the thick cuffs holding him down did they job, and someone was holding his head steady, and he couldn’t speak to do much more than moan his protests and pleas for them to stop.

They didn’t.

They tried to comfort him, to tell him he’d be alright. But it seemed to take forever, and finally it was done.

Cas lay there, panting, and flinched when the doctor came to stand over him.

“Never expected an angel to come for me,” he said. His voice was low, so Cas suspected that while the other staff had left, they were at least nearby. “But I bet you’ll taste better than anybody else I’ve eaten. Our little dinner date’ll have to be later, though; hope you don’t think I’m rude. The nurses switch shifts in about an hour, and that’s the best time, I think. See you then. Angel.”

He petted Cas’s cheek, grinning, and then walked away.

Cas tugged helplessly at the restraints, but with the drug still in his system, and the sigil binding his Grace when he needed it the most, all he could hope for him was that the brothers came to check on him before the doctor returned.

++

The two of them had snuck into and out of more hospitals than they could probably remember, and this one was no different.

The key was to look like you belonged, and the medical coats they lifted from a rack helped; no one looked twice at them as they made their way through the E.R, casually checking all the rooms and cubicles for their angel.

And not finding him.

Dean knew it was pointless, since Cas was on enforced radio silence with that sigil in place, but he sent a quick prayer to the angel anyway, promising to kick his ass if he’d gotten into trouble.

By the time they’d checked the minor treatment area, the only place an angel with a dislocated knee would be, they were both sure Cas was in trouble.

“When we get out of here,” Dean snapped at his brother, and Sam paled, but didn’t back down.

“We’ll find him. He’ll be okay, we’ll get that sigil off and then we can get home. It was a good plan, Dean.”

Yeah. Fucking great plan that saw Cas now vulnerable and missing, in a big ass hospital.

As they passed the nurses’ station, Dean saw it was unattended and took the opportunity. He had Sam stand watch and quickly called up the list of patients admitted that evening.

Only one came in with a dislocated knee, and Dean’s heart clambered into his throat when he read the notes.

“He’s in the ICU,” he told Sam. “Breathing difficulties, bad reaction to a painkiller.”

Sam looked horrified. 

“Yeah, you two wiseasses didn’t think of that, huh? That without his Grace he might be allergic to something.”

But all the same it didn’t ring true. It was possible but, shitty as their luck often was, Dean didn’t feel it.

Either way, they were getting to Cas and finding out what the hell was going on. Sam pointed to the sign arrowed ahead, marked ICU, and they followed it fast but careful, until they were at the doors leading into the unit.

It was a little busier, so they had to be more careful, but they found Cas alone in a room at the end of the hall.

Dean wasn’t sure who he was angrier at then, Cas, or Sam, or the fuckers who’d done this to their angel, but he shoved it aside, and quickly closed the doors after them.

“Cas, Cas, we’re here,” Sam said, and ran to the angel’s side.

He was strapped down to the bed, bad enough, preventing him from doing either of the things he and Sam had insisted would be a quick remedy to his situation: wiping off the sigil, or running.

Of course, with his knee still not fixed, running would have been impossible anyway.

But it the intubation Dean was most angry at. Because Cas was conscious and struggling weakly against a foot of plastic in his throat, and probably in a whole lot of pain.

Dean grabbed Cas’s shoulders, leaned over him.

“We’re here,” he said. “Cas, you gotta calm down and stay still. We’ll take the tube out.”

He looked at Sam who was carefully turning off the alarms so when they took the tube out of Cas’s throat, the machine wouldn’t alert the nurses.

But they’d have to be quick and, while Dean had been intubated himself more than once, he was wary of doing Cas real damage.

Even if all they had to do then was smudge the mark on his shoulder.

“Cas, listen to me,” Dean said. “Once I disconnect the oxygen supply, it’s gonna feel like you can’t breathe. But I can’t take the tube out until I detach it from the machine. You trust me, right?”

Cas looked terrified, but he nodded.

Sam didn’t look much better, but he took over holding Cas still while Dean removed the section of tubing that was attached to the air supply and tossed it aside.

Cas grew taut with the effort not to panic, but Dean knew he had moments at best before the angel’s body overrode his control and tried to find air when there wasn’t any.

He grabbed the tube, prayed to a god he was pretty sure wasn’t listening, and slowly pulled the tube free.

Cas coughed, loudly, and Sam quickly covered his mouth, muttering an apology at their hurt friend. But the last thing they needed was someone coming in to check on them, and they were a lot closer to the nurses’ station than was comfortable.

But Cas got the hint; he spasmed, but managed to control the coughing enough that Sam was able to let go.

“I’m sorry, Cas,” he said. He and Dean carefully unbuckled the restraints around the angel, and then helped him sit up.

“What the hell did those fuckers do to you?” Dean demanded. Cas was like a string-cut puppet; if they didn’t have hold of him, he would have just flopped back down.

“Sedative,” he forced out, and Dean saw the red puncture mark on the angel’s arm. “The doctor...the doctor...it’s him.”

That made sense, but Dean felt angrier than ever. It felt like they’d gone into this half-assed, and when he got these two home he’d have more than a few things to say to them about the whole mess.

But they still had an angel to fix, and a hunt to finish.

There were some antibacterial wipes on a nearby trolley. Dean snatched the container up and tossed to it Sam.

Or tried to.

The door opened in one smooth unexpected motion, and a man in a doctor’s coat caught the container before it got anyway near the other hunter.

“Oh, we can’t have that,” the man said, and closed the door behind him. “I’ve been looking forward to this feast since that sumptuous creature showed up in the E.R.”

He eyed Cas hungrily, and Dean didn’t hesitate, side stepped until he was between Cas and, clearly, the thing that had been feeding off people and covering up their deaths.

“Yeah, hate to disappoint you, but angel’s off the menu.”

He heard Sam moving to his right, to come around the table and flank him, but they were deep in the shit here.

They’d dangled Cas in front of this guy, and with the sedative in his system, a dislocated knee and his Grace trapped, the angel was vulnerable.

All this guy had to do was yell, concoct some story, and get the brothers kicked out or arrested, and he’d have what he wanted.

He could bolt after that, he’d probably have to anyway, find someplace new to set up, but by then…

By then, he’d have drained Cas dry.

Only what he decided to do would direct how they played this, and Dean watched the bastard run it all through in his head.

And then he smiled, and that smile wasn’t human.

“Maybe I’ll let you two watch,” he said, and pounced.

++

Sam, like Dean, always carried an angel blade. Guns had their uses, but the blades were mostly kill-all, and great for close quarter work or when guns were just too noisy to be practical.

Like now, so, just as Dean did, Sam pulled his own weapon out and launched himself at the doctor.

He was fast, though, parrying Dean’s initial attack, then slamming him down to the floor.

Sam had a little better luck; his first slash drew blood, but nowhere vital. The doctor hissed, and drew back, but Sam wasn’t fooled.

He made like he was going to follow, but faked out at the last moment, and so missed getting ripped open by the claws that suddenly appeared at the end of the doctor’s finger tips.

 _What other surprises have you got_ , Sam wondered, but then Dean was getting to his feet.

The doctor positioned himself against the door, and laughed, loudly.

He didn’t seem too worried at them being disturbed, and Sam’s thoughts must have shown on his face, because the thing shrugged.

“I might have slightly spoiled my appetite,” he admitted. “Couldn’t quite wait to get to your helpless little angel.”

The nurse. Or nurses. Anyone else who might be able to raise an alarm.

Sam felt sick. This thing was going for broke. It had to know its time feeding in this hospital was up, and it was through giving a fuck about covering its tracks.

“Don’t worry, I made sure to save enough room for your friend.”

He lunged at them, and Sam was thrown aside, crashed against some medical equipment and slammed into the corner. His head swam, but he saw Dean rushing the doctor, and they were grappling, but this thing was strong, and it would easily break Dean in two.

It was trying. Dean was pushing up with his angel blade, trying to ram it through the guy’s throat.

The guy had hold of Dean’s wrist, easily holding it in place, and his other arm was pinning Dean to him.

And he was slowly, very slowly, bending himself forwards, and Dean backwards, already reaching the point where human bodies just weren’t meant to bend, and the pain was showing, and at any minute Sam expected to hear the crack as his brother’s back broke.

It didn’t come.

The scream of pain that did, came from the doctor.

There was an angel blade, Sam’s blade, sticking out of his back, and Cas pushed it in deeper, practically using all his weight to do so.

He was almost hanging off it.

The doctor made a horrible gurgling sound, and then spun around, knocking Cas back onto the gurney. His hands locked down over Cas’s face, covering his mouth and nose, and the angel struggled frantically, clawing at the grip.

Dean jumped him, pushed the blade in with the strength needed to deliver the killing blow, and the creature finally, finally, gave it up.

He collapsed forward onto Cas, and Dean quickly grabbed the body and dumped it to the side, hauling the angel upright.

“You okay?”

Cas coughed, nodded, sagged forward until his head was on Dean’s shoulder. Dean looked at Sam, who was slowly picking himself up.

“You okay?”

Sam nodded, and limped over.

“Dumbasses,” Dean said. He spat on his hand, rubbed his fingers over the Cas’s skin where he knew the sharpie sigil was and then felt the thrum of Grace move through the angel.

Cas sat back, colour returned, no longer looking like he was going to pass out.

He put a hand on Dean, and another on Sam, and healed their injuries from the fight, and then climbed down off the bed.

“Now we should run?”

Sam looked down at the doctor’s body, and imagined the other ones just awaiting discovery.

“Sounds good, yeah. Just as soon as we take care of the surveillance system and wipe your admission from the system.”

Dean nodded, and led the two of them outside.

++

They were reporting the suspicious deaths on the radio less than thirty minutes after the trio left.

Cas was in the backseat, having changed there into some of Dean’s clothes and out of that horrible hospital gown.

Dean turned the news off, found a classic rock station, and switched to that instead.

He could see Sam and Cas exchanging looks, and figured any minute, one or both of them would start in about what had happened.

Of course, it was Sam.

“Dean,” he started, but Dean shook his head. 

“Not while I’m driving.”

“Oh, please,” Sam said. “We’ve nearly had fist fights while you’re driving, don’t act like you can’t listen and keep on the right side of the road.”

Okay, fine. They wanted to do this.

“That was a stupid fucking plan,” he said. “I don’t know what the hell you two were thinking.”

“We were thinking,” Cas said, “that it made more sense for me to go in there. All I had to do, should have had to do was wipe off the sigil and my Grace would have been restored.”

“And was that how it turned out?”

“When do things ever go completely to plan on a hunt?” Sam said.

Dammit. “A lot of the time, Sam, a whole lot of the time. This one ended up with Cas nearly getting eaten, a plastic tube down his throat and some bastard trying to smother him!”

Nobody said anything for a while, and Dean let them stew. He didn’t understand why, after all this time, they didn’t get it. They were his literal world, and it was his job to keep them safe.

Yeah, there was the job, hunts would always be risky, and they could never completely cover every eventuality. There were always curve balls, and the thing was he knew that Sam and Cas’s plan had been mostly sound.

There were some things he would have tweaked, but still.

He just couldn’t get how helpless and alone Cas had been, vulnerable and needing them, out of his head.

He’d told himself that wouldn’t happen again.

“I’m sorry,” Cas said, and maybe he’d broadcast some of that to the angel, or maybe it was just how well Cas knew him by then.

Dean shrugged. Not the most gracious acceptance of the angel’s apology but there was no way he could, or would, put all of that into words.

Not right now, anyway.

“Look, Dean,” Sam started, but Dean waved him off.

“Driving.” 

Sam groaned, good naturedly but it became more heartfelt when Dean reached forward and turned up the music.

“Something wrong, Sammy?” He had to raise this voice to make himself heard.

Sam fought down a grin. “Oh, no, nothing.”

He looked back to see Cas rolling his eyes, and then settling back for the rest of their journey.

He was okay. Sam, he was okay too. And Dean himself...they’d scared him tonight, scared themselves he could tell, but they'd pulled through as a family and now they were going home.

Yeah, they were all okay.

**Author's Note:**

> Cas hurts himself in this story, so he has an injury that will get him into the E.R.
> 
> He is sedated to a level against his will, and restrained then forcibly intubated as part of the killer’s plan to feed from him later.
> 
> The killer also tries to smother him, but Dean prevents this.


End file.
